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Review: Young, gifted and a problem

22 February 1992

By DAVID COHEN

Little Man Tate A film on general release, directed by Jodie Foster

To be a gifted child is not a simple blessing, psychologists have come
to see. Gifted children are often pushed by their parents and rejected by
their peers. The average 8-year-old doesn’t feel like mucking about with
another kid who may start talking about Einstein. Jodie Foster’s film explores
an interesting issue and is often endearing. But Little Man Tate also sets
out to be an issue film. It’s about the dilemmas of gifted children. In
that respect, it doesn’t so much fail as come at the ‘problem’ in a odd
way.

Foster plays Didi Tate, the working-class single mother of Fred. Fred
is a 7-year-old genius. His IQ score zooms off the Stanford Binet scale.
He plays the piano beautifully, does complex sums and doesn’t just love
Vincent Van Gogh but has intuitions about him. His mother loves him and
won’t let him take any IQ tests. Fred worries too much already; he has an
ulcer. More selfishly, Didi is afraid that she will lose him if he gets
caught up with psychologists. Many parents of gifted children are different.
They want their children to perform and that pressure creates emotional
problems.

Little Fred’s life among his peers is more typical. He is bored at school.
A local institute for gifted children wants him to join them. Didi resists
but finally lets a restless Fred go with Dr Jane Grierson on her odyssey
of the mind. This is a tour of nearby towns. Grierson lectures on the importance
of fulfilling the potential of your gifted child and the children then answer
questions. Fred shines. He’s not only smarter than the other brat brains
but more of a human being.

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The film becomes an unusual triangle as pushy psychologist and frightened
mother fight over the lad. The film’s depiction of the psychologist is strange.
Dr Grierson was unloved by her parents, is cold, can’t cook and insists
on feeding children macrobiotic brain food which Fred sicks up. This woman
has real psychological problems.

The conflict comes to a head on television. Dr Grierson is invited on
to show off Fred on the Live Wire show. Fred misses his mother and is fed
up with having to perform IQ magic. So he sabotages the show. The ‘normal’
gifted kids boast of their work on subatomic physics or on their first pre-teen
post-feminist novel. Fred says he wants to be a firefighter, recites a lousy
poem and says his mother is dead. He then runs home to Mom making his way
hundreds of miles across the US.

As Fred is only seven and an all American cutie pie, he brings the two
women in his life together. He tells Mom he really loves her and makes her
so secure that she lets him continue studying at the Grierson Institute.
With his mother’s help, he teaches Dr Grierson to relax and have fun.

There are some nice touches. In class, Fred is asked which numbers from
0 to 9 are divisible by 2. ‘All of them,’ he says which is right but not
the right maths answer for 7-year-olds. Foster uses good graphics to try
to show how answers float into Fred’s mind. The film ends on a nice irony
as Fred observes that after a year he was no longer the big IQ news. A 6-year-old
got into law school and that was mega. The performances – especially Foster’s
and Fred (Adam Hann) – are good.

It’s a film worth seeing and its message is sensible. IQ is not everything.
Yet it left me feeling that there was a truer film to be made about what
is an intriguing dilemma: how does one develop the gifts of gifted children
without maiming them emotionally?

David Cohen founded Psychology News. His film The Pleasure Principle
opened in London last week.